Mastering….is it just another in and out tray??

Hi guys

If you follow me on twitter, you may have noticed my mini breakdown on friday night . I thought i had better give some kind of explanation. So here goes….

I was checking my new followers, and came across some kind of audio based referal service. So i clicked on the “mastering” heading (well i’m going to aren’t i ). In there, i see so called mastering services hawking their wares for £25 a track. Now we all know this goes on, and normally i couldn’t care less, but on this occasion it got to me. It was maybe down to the fact i had just handed over PS010 to public spaces, which i have been working on for a few weeks between jobs. Let me explain…I come from a rock based background…guitars bass and drums(vocals optional :p), so the public spaces compilation was quite a different deal for me. However…when i handed that over, a small part of me went with it.

I’ve said before in my blogs etc, mastering is the very first thing in my life, that i have wanted badly enough to actually keep going at, and anyone reading who has fought through the same thing knows how damn hard it can be. So many facets, so many tools… so many setbacks!. I certainly never thought about getting rich out of it, i invested 2 years of my life and all the money i had left into trying to make it happen.

So….with my fury at reading about cheap “mastering” , i tweeted

“people are mastering for £25 per track. i cant force myself to knock “shit” out that fast. so what am i gonna learn to do next “…..

It may have a smiley face on it, but dont be fooled, for some  reason, the bottom had just fallen out of my sad little world!!. Then, a follower  who i dont think i’ve ever spoken with before replied with “45 minutes a song is too fast? That’s a pretty good living, no? There’s always investment banking…“  . i have no idea if the guy was serious, but either way, it was a wake up call to me, that as with every other god forsaken business on the earth… there are too many people doing the wrong job! .

I then went on to tweet something along the lines of…”i’ve wasted my time learning this stuff”, to which all my twitter mates started asking what was wrong and trying to boost me back up etc, and thanks guys!!, the net may have many bad sides to it, but through it, i’ve met many like minded intelligent people. I could only dream of finding such friends in the cold reality of the semi caveman society we now live in.

So…back to the point. Is it just another job?. I know I haven’t  been doing it long compared to some, but long enough that its no longer a glorified hobby. My approach is still the same….it gets my very best, and sometimes, even when the material isn’t my usual listening style etc, i get a feel for it, get inside it, to be able to make that material all I possibly can.Trust me when i say, theres always something i’m not happy with in a finish, something i couldn’t quite fix…or some trade off in sound somewhere. I actually blame myself for not being able to fix mix mistakes!

All i want, is to replace someone that doesn’t deserve that seat, in front of the great monitors etc. I’m actually worried about what i will go onto, if i cant manage to make this work. Watching a comedy panel show the other night, someone made a comment about the moon landing astronauts, how everything after that must seem very pale/average.

After 25 years of doing complete passionless rubbish, just to put bread on the table for another day of monotony, and also discovering that i’m only about 76pence in the pound,  i’ve had a small taste of that moon landing. There wont be any going back, one way or another.

Thanks for reading my sad little heart felt rant. I thought i’d better explain

Tone